Never forget Jelena! Though Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have moved past their on-again, off-again romance of three years, the pair can’t seem to stop talking about one another. After the Disney alum, 23, gushed about her ex’s comeback to The New York Times last week, saying, “This is what I always saw in him,” Bieber, 21, also spoke out about their relationship in his new Complex magazine cover shoot.
“I learned a lot,” the “What Do You Mean?” singer said of his romance with Gomez, which started in 2011. “I moved in with my girlfriend when I was 18. Started my own life with her. It was a marriage kind of thing. Living with a girl, it was just too much at that age. But we were so in love. Nothing else mattered.”
He went on to outline how such a dependence was potentially damaging to him at an early age.
“We were all about each other,” he said. “But when it’s like that and you get your value from that, people will always disappoint you. Your girl or your dude, they’re always going to disappoint you. Your full identity can’t be in that person. My identity was in her. Her identity was in me. When stuff would happen, I would lose my freakin’ mind, and she would lose her mind, and we would fight so hard because we were so invested in each other… I can’t lean on people. I got to lean on God. I gotta trust in him through all my situations. Then, hopefully, my other relationships will flourish around me.”
Despite telling Ellen DeGeneres earlier this month that he’s single, Bieber also implied that he’s been regularly dating someone … someone who is nothing like Gomez.
“I’m kind of seeing this girl, right?” he told Complex. “I’m shy about doing or saying certain things, and then I say it and it’s not even a problem. And I’ll remember when I couldn’t…. You’re just scarred and you don’t do something because in your last relationship they’d freak out, but [the new person is] just like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
The Grammy nominee also admitted to wrongdoing after years of arrests and outrageous antics. He was often mocked (and even roasted on Comedy Central) for his behavior that landed him in jail and court several times.
“I’m not going to say I’m sorry for the things that I’ve done because I think that it allows me to tell a story,” Bieber said. But he added, “I forgot what I was about, what my mom raised me to be. I veered off, and I got tainted… I got into a little bit of trouble — nothing that other 20-year-olds don’t get into — just rebelling a little bit. Now, being 21, I’m coming into my own and around some pretty cool people who are not afraid to tell me what’s real.”
He even alluded to some of his shenanigans having potentially life-threatening consequences.
“I was doing anything. I was doing so many things that I shouldn’t even be on the planet still,” he said. “I think that it was by the grace of God. The whole time, [manager] Scooter [Braun] always made sure I was safe and made sure situations didn’t escalate. He’d fix every situation. It almost wasn’t good, because I’d be like, any time I wanna do something, Scooter is gonna take care of it. It backfired a few times.”
